Scandalous

Chapter 25

She was awake before Claire by almost two hours.

This was not unusual — Shae had always been an early riser in the specific way of people whose minds do not power down cleanly at the end of a day but instead continue running at a lower voltage through the night and simply resume at full capacity somewhere around six in the morning regardless of what time she'd gone to bed. She lay in the Texas King with the pale morning light coming through the curtains and the warm, even weight of Claire asleep beside her — face-down, one arm thrown out, the absolute unconscious commitment of a girl who slept the way she did everything else, completely — and she looked at the ceiling.

She had been looking at the ceiling, in various configurations of the same thought, since approximately five-fifteen.

The gymnasium. The orange light. The drinks table along the east wall with its dry ice vapor trailing from every cup lifted from it. The specific, unhurried way he had looked at her costume — not the scan of a teacher performing a general visual check of the room, but the particular recognition of a person identifying something immediately and with precision. Catherine Earnshaw. Not a question. Just the name, levelly, as if it were simply a thing being identified.

She had chosen it for the literary accuracy. She had chosen it because the pale dress and the dark hair and the dried flowers worked with who she was rather than against it, the way most Halloween costumes required a person to become something foreign to themselves and this one simply required her to be more of what she already was. She had chosen it because she had spent three weeks inside that novel and Catherine Earnshaw felt, by the end of those three weeks, like a woman she understood.

She had also, she was now admitting to the ceiling in the grey six o'clock quiet, chosen it knowing he would know it.

She had not fully articulated this to herself at the time of choosing. She had let it remain in the category of unstated considerations — the kind that influence a decision without being acknowledged as influences, that allow you to do a thing and tell yourself the stated reason is the whole reason. The stated reason was accurate. It simply wasn't complete.

You look the part.

She pressed her lips together.

The flutter was immediate and specific and she told it with complete firmness to stop.

Claire surfaced at half past eight with the gradual, reluctant quality of a person returning to consciousness from somewhere comfortable and not entirely willing to complete the journey. She rolled onto her back, looked at the ceiling, made a sound that communicated both her general state and her feelings about it, and then turned her head toward Shae.

"You've been awake for a while," she said. Not a question.

"A while," Shae confirmed.

Claire looked at her with the lidded, assessing expression of someone who is not fully operational but whose instincts are already running. She had this quality — the way her perception functioned even before the rest of her was present, as if it ran on a separate system that didn't require full wakefulness. She looked at Shae for a moment in the specific way that meant she was reading something.

"The dance was good," she said.

"Mm."

"The punch was terrible."

"Aggressively orange," Shae said.

Claire's mouth curved. She turned back to the ceiling. "The astronaut turned out to be Marcus Hale, which was — unexpected. He looks entirely different when his face is visible."

"Better or worse?"

"Different," Claire said, which was diplomatic. A pause. "Mr. Kingston looked good."

Shae looked at the ceiling. "He was there for the drinks table."

"He was there for the drinks table," Claire agreed, in a tone that managed to repeat the statement back with something entirely different in it. "In the little Victorian waistcoat thing. Very — literary."

"It suited him," Shae said.

She said it the way she might say the fog machine was effective or the decorations were well-executed — a simple, factual observation. She felt the warmth in it as it left her mouth and had a brief, unwelcome awareness that she had not said it the way she'd intended it to sound.

Claire turned her head.

Shae kept her eyes on the ceiling.

"Shae," Claire said.

"What."

"It suited him," Claire repeated. Slowly. With the quality of someone holding a piece of evidence up to the light.

"I was making an observation."

"You were making an observation," Claire said, "in a voice I have never once heard you use about a tweed blazer."

"He wasn't wearing a tweed—"

"Oh my God." Claire sat up. She looked at Shae with the full, round-eyed expression of someone who has just received a confirmation they were not entirely prepared for. "You want to f**k him."

The heat arrived in Shae's face before she could prevent it — the specific, immediate bloom of it in her cheeks, the involuntary physiological response of a body that does not consult the mind before making these announcements.

"I don't—" she started.

"You're blushing," Claire said, with the delighted incredulity of someone witnessing a rare natural phenomenon. "Shae Madison is blushing."

"I'm not—"

"Your entire face is red."

"Claire—"

"You are a slut," Claire said, with the specific, affectionate delivery of a best friend using the word as a term of endearment rather than a charge. She was grinning. "You absolute slut, you've got a thing for Mr. Kingston."

"I do not have a thing—"

"I'm not judging you," Claire said immediately, with the earnestness of someone who means it. "Genuinely. Because, okay—" she pulled her knees to her chest and considered this with the honest, open assessment she brought to everything "— he is pretty hot. For an English teacher."

Shae looked at her. "He's in his mid-thirties, Claire."

Claire shrugged. The single, easy lift of a shoulder that communicated: and your point is.

"So?" she said. "That just means he's more experienced. Mature." She tilted her head. "Think about it. Teenage boys are—" she made a gesture that encompassed an entire category of experience "—messy. They rush everything. They're thinking about themselves the entire time, checking in with their own situation, couldn't find a woman's anything if you gave them a map and a torch." She said this with the particular authority of someone who has conducted the relevant research and arrived at conclusions. "They have no idea what they're doing and they don't particularly care to find out."

Shae said nothing.

"Mr. Kingston," Claire said, raising an eyebrow with the deliberate, considered quality of someone presenting an argument they've thought through, "does not strike me as that kind of man."

The heat that bloomed was lower this time. Not her face.

"He seems like—" Claire paused, selecting. "You know the type. The ones who actually pay attention. Who take their time." Her eyebrow stayed raised. "The ones who'd make sure you were completely taken care of before they even thought about themselves." A beat. "The gentleman type."

Shae's mind slipped.

She didn't invite it. It arrived the way the three seconds at the drinks table had arrived — without authorization, without the preliminary of a decision — and it was there before she could close the door on it. His hands. The specific, lean build of him in the waistcoat, the rolled sleeves on ordinary days, the way he moved through a classroom with the unhurried ease of someone who was comfortable in their own body. His hands on her, the imagined weight of them, moving along the curve of her waist and lower—

His mouth at her neck. The specific warmth of it, the unhurried quality of a man who was doing exactly what Claire had described — taking his time, paying attention, finding the places that— the low sound of his voice at her ear, that accent, the specific music of it saying something low and private just for her—

She blinked.

She was in her bedroom. Saturday morning. Claire on the bed beside her with her knees pulled up.

She shook her head — a small, brief, clearing motion.

Claire was watching her with the expression of someone who has just watched a very interesting three seconds occur on someone else's face and is cataloguing every frame of it.

Shae looked at her. "He's married," she said.

The two words with all the weight of the argument she'd been making to herself since approximately October. The clearest, most structurally sound reason available. The one that should, by any reasonable logic, function as a full stop.

Claire looked at her for a moment. She uncurled slightly from her position and looked at Shae with the expression that was less the teasing one and more the real one — the one that meant she was about to say something she actually meant.

"I've been in that classroom," she said. "I've watched him for two months." A pause. "He doesn't look happy, Shae." She said it simply, without drama. "Like — generally. He looks like someone going through the motions of a life he designed a long time ago and has been maintaining out of habit." She looked at her hands briefly. "Except—" she stopped.

"Except what," Shae said, and her voice came out quieter than she intended.

Claire met her eyes. "The only time he actually looks happy," she said, "is when he sees you."

The room was quiet.

The morning light had gone from grey to the pale gold of a California November morning, coming through the curtains in thin, warm lines across the foot of the bed. Somewhere outside in the woods a bird was doing the thing birds did at this hour, the same phrase repeated at intervals with the patient persistence of a creature that has one message and intends to deliver it.

Shae looked at the light on the bedding.

She didn't say anything.

Claire, to her credit, didn't push. She reached over and took Shae's hand briefly — the small, warm pressure of it, a thing said without words — and then let go and announced she was going to need coffee immediately or she could not be held responsible for her behavior, and swung her legs off the bed with the returning energy of someone who has said the true thing and is now moving on.

Shae sat with it.

Claire left at half past ten with the easy, undramatic departure of a person who had an afternoon and intended to use it — a hug at the door, a reminder about something school-related that Shae processed only partially, and then the sound of the car on the gravel drive fading into the trees.

Shae stood in the foyer for a moment in the quiet of the house.

Then she went upstairs.

She sat at her desk. She opened her laptop. The document was there from the week before — two pages, the beginning of something, the first move toward the assignment she'd started before she'd fully known what she was writing. She read them back.

A girl in a library. A man who came in every Tuesday and sat at the far table with a stack of books he worked through with the focused, particular attention of someone for whom reading was not a leisure activity but a form of thinking. She had written the girl noticing him gradually — not all at once, not the sudden recognition of a film, but incrementally, over weeks, the slow accumulation of observations that had no single significant moment but added to something significant in sum.

She had not named either of them.

She hadn't named the feeling either. She had written around it — the girl finding reasons to be in the library on Tuesdays, the awareness of his presence as a kind of orientation, the way the room had a different quality when he was in it and a flatter quality when he wasn't.

She read it back now and felt, with the particular discomfort of recognition, that she had written something true while believing she was writing something invented.

She put her fingers on the keys.

She thought about what Claire had said. The only time he actually looks happy is when he sees you. The simplicity of it. The way it had landed not as a romantic observation but as something more troubling — something that asked a question about what it meant to be the source of someone's light when you had no right to be, when the geography of the situation made it something that couldn't exist outside of these small, stolen intervals of a classroom and a hallway and a drinks table in a gymnasium.

She began to write.

The girl in the library had a name now — not her name, a different one, a name she chose because it carried none of her own associations. The man had a name too. She wrote them as distinct from herself and Nathan with the careful deliberateness of someone constructing a fiction and the simultaneous awareness that the fiction was permeable, that what was coming through the keys was not invented so much as translated.

She wrote the Tuesday when the girl finally spoke to him. Not about anything important — about a book they'd both reached for on the same shelf at the same moment, the mild comedy of it, the conversation that had followed for ten minutes before either of them had noticed the time. She wrote the specific quality of the conversation — the way it had moved without effort, each thing leading naturally to the next, the relief of being met rather than accommodated.

She wrote: She had not known, before this, that she had been waiting for someone to keep up with her. She had thought the mild frustration of always going slower than her mind wanted to go was simply the condition of existing among people. It had not occurred to her that it was something that could be different.

She stopped. Read the sentence back.

She left it.

She kept writing.